Winners of Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters and the Arts

Published: April 1, 1988

Correction Appended

PUBLIC SERVICE The Charlotte Observer

The Observer won for its articles revealing the misuse of funds by the television ministry of the evangelist Jim Bakker. Among the pieces were several by Charles E. Shepard that detailed how Mr. Bakker had had an affair with Jessica Hahn in 1980 and then paid $265,000 to cover it up. Other articles reported that Mr. Bakker, his wife, Tammy, and their top aides had secretly received millions in bonuses and lived lives of incredible excess. For instance, a 29-year-old personal assistant to Mr. Bakker received $610,000 in 15 months, exchanged $40,000 Jaguars with his brother as a Christmas present and wore a mink coat. The articles prompted Jim Bakker to resign from the ministry he had built. In addition, the Bakkers and the PTL ministry are being investigated by Federal and state authorities, including agents from the Postal Service and Internal Revenue Service. GENERAL NEWS REPORTING The Alabama Journal

To produce its series on the infant mortality crisis in Alabama - which has the highest such death rate in the nation - the 100-year-old Journal, published in Montgomery, used the talents of almost half its entire city staff: Frank Bass, Emily Bentley, Susan Eggering and Peggy Roberts. For three months, they worked with Jim Tharpe, the managing editor, and Ann Green, the city editor, to produce more than 20 articles. These were published over five consecutive days last September in The Journal, which has a circulation of 20,000, and then reprinted as a special, 5,000-copy tabloid. The series, ''A Death in the Family,'' was a story told in chilling statistics and vivid human portraits. According to the newspaper, Gov. Guy Hunt has now pledged to seek $6 million from the Legislature to combat the crisis. The series produced something else for what Mr. Tharpe proudly described as a ''scrappy, little, struggling afternoon newspaper'' - its first Pulitzer Prize. The Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune

Descended from The Essex Eagle, founded in 1867, The Eagle-Tribune won its first Pulitzer Prize for more than 175 articles over nine months on the issue of prison furloughs. This was spurred by an incident last April in which a couple in Maryland were taken hostage, assaulted and terrorized by a convicted murderer who had fled on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Susan Forrest and Barbara Walsh were the principal reporters in a team of about a half dozen. Recently, the State Senate passed a bill to ban furloughs for prisoners sentenced to life terms without parole for first-degree murder. But neither that result nor the Pulitzer were the real point. ''I believe that reporting has its own value,'' said the paper's editor, Daniel J. Warner. ''You don't have to accomplish anything but you do have to report.'' INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING Dean Baquet, William C. Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski, The Chicago Tribune

The three reporters won for a series of articles about Chicago's City Council - how the deals are made and the politics played. Often, the series concluded, it is to the detriment of the city. Mr. Baquet, who is 31 years old, was born in New Orleans, attended Columbia University and is the paper's associate metropolitan editor-chief investigative reporter. He joined The Tribune as a reporter in 1984 after reporting for The Times-Picayune/The States-Item in New Orleans from 1978 to 1984. Mr. Gaines, 54, was born in Indianapolis and graduated from Butler University. He joined the Tribune in 1963 after spending the first years of his career in radio and television news. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1976 for his work in exposing conditions in two Chicago hospitals. Mrs. Lipinski, 32, is a native of Trenton, Mich., and has worked for the Tribune since 1978, starting there as an intern and remaining as a reporter in the paper's features department. She attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The series, which resulted in proposals to reform the city's zoning laws, detailed everything from the missuse of office allowances among alderman to how one official tried to use his office to promote a private brand of cola. EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM Daniel Hertzberg and James B. Stewart, The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Hertzberg and Mr. Stewart won for their articles about an investment banker charged with insider trading and about the events on Wall Street after the stock market collapse. The 42-year-old Mr. Hertzberg, a native of New York City, is deputy news editor of The Journal. He joined the paper in 1977 after graduating from the University of Chicago and working for The Buffalo Evening News. Mr. Stewart, 36, was born in Quincy, Ill. He holds degrees from DePaul University and Harvard Law School, and worked for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a New York law firm, and was executive editor of the American Lawyer magazine, before joining The Journal in 1983. Their article on insider trading analyzed the rise and fall of Martin A. Siegel, one of Wall Street's leading investment bankers. The other winning piece analyzed how the nation's financial system came close to catastrophe on Oct. 20, the day after the stock prices suffered their most precipitous single-day decline in history. SPECIALIZED REPORTING Walt Bogdanich, The Wall Street Journal

Correction: April 2, 1988, Saturday, Late City Final Edition It was DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. In some editions, a sketch of Jacqui Banaszynski, a reporter for The St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch who won a Pulitzer for feature writing, described her winning three-part series incorrectly. The articles dealt with two homosexual farmers in rural Minnesota and the responses of their families and the community as one died with AIDS and the other grew sicker.